Program seeks to groom students left behind

Program seeks to groom the brilliant, low-income students whom HISD leaves behind.

Copyright 2012: Houston Chronicle

Published 5:44 pm, Friday, November 16, 2012

Of the more than 200,000 students in the Houston Independent School District, a lucky portion go to our half dozen or so exemplary-ranked schools. Others are in magnet programs for the gifted and talented. All provide excellent conduits to a good college.

An equally important number of HISD students, however - and the exact figure can't be known - may have the same talent, but neither the ZIP code nor parental guidance to reach those quality programs. Regardless of income, in fact, only about 100 HISD students were accepted to elite out-of-state schools in 2010. The Emerge Fellowship, a Houston mentoring program for low-income students, believes this is a problem.

They're right.

Now, it's true that Texas' excellent universities play a large part in many Houston students' decisions to stay in the state.

But if only a tiny handful out of 200,000 kids get accepted to the best of the best schools outside of Texas, regional sentiment clearly isn't the lone factor. Partly, these students may not value the new, unfamiliar experiences they'd get at an out–of–state school. Partly, they're spooked by the huge tuitions at private non-Texas universities.

And partly, HISD may not be grooming them to compete.

For more affluent kids, these trends are less of an issue. After all, with an education from HISD's best public schools and the polish from a Texas university, these middle-class kids will meet, learn from and influence non-Texans throughout their business and private lives.

It's the brilliant, low-income students who are the great loss. If they aren't exposed to global ideas and opportunities through college, they may never encounter them at all.

But getting into this country's elite universities requires a daunting array of cultural and intellectual skills - all of which need to be assembled long before senior year. Our most gifted but most disadvantaged students stand little chance of acquiring these skills on their own.

And these disadvantaged students have another reason to aim high: Harvard, Yale, Brown, MIT and some other elite universities actually waive tuition for mid-and low-income students whom they accept. That's how important economic diversity is to creating a world-class student body. Now Houston has to do a better job of preparing those kids to get in.

Emerge Fellowship is a two-year-old nonprofit whose volunteers include Ivy League graduates who went on to work in Teach for America. These activists understand elite education. And they understand poverty. They're determined to mentor those gifted, low-income HISD kids early enough to prepare them for the nation's top schools.

Emerge has had success in the past two years. Of the 14 students Emerge mentored in its first year, one went to Dartmouth, one to Oberlin, two to Tufts and one to Harvard. The group is now mentoring about 80 students. This is a public service that reaches far beyond the students themselves.

The American university system, with its geographically diverse student bodies and deep intellectual traditions, is one of the U.S. products that remains the best in the world. If Houston's gifted but low-income kids aren't adding to that tradition, it's more than just a loss for them individually. It's a loss for Americans outside of Texas, who after all, derive so much of their world view from their peers during college. It's a loss for the elite institutions that, like it or not, so inform our national conversation.

And it's a loss for Houston, a city that, more than others, draws its strength, innovation, and prosperity from the wisdom our residents bring from afar.